It really seems that the economic crisis is affecting pretty much everyone these days, and for this reason, the various consumer electronics manufacturers out there come up with certain products that feature both a wide array of attractive features and relatively affordable price points. That's also the case with TomTom's latest offering, the GO 740 LIVE Connected PND, which, despite of featuring pretty much the best technologies TomTom has to offer, is not exactly hugely expensive.

Thus, the device is able to deliver a host of very interesting features, meant to make things a lot easier for the user, such as real-time traffic information, TomTom Fuel Price Service, Local Search powered by Google, TomTom Weather, QuickGPSfix and TomTom Buddies, plus a very useful voice recognition system, which allows drivers to control the PND by using nothing more than their own voice.

However, before going any deeper into what every feature mentioned above has to offer, let's take a very quick look at the technical specs of the GO 740. Thus, beside the generic “high-sensitivity GPS receiver”, the device sports a built-in SIM card and GPRS modem, which make most of the features mentioned above possible. Other than that, we're talking about a fairly normal PND, incorporating a 4.3-inch display (480 x 272 pixels, 64K colors), 2 GB of flash storage, plus a Bluetooth module for handsfree calling and 3-hour rechargeable battery.

The TomTom GO 740 LIVE comes pre-loaded with a new and extended version of TomTom’s IQ Routes technology, which calculates routes based on historical travel time information for every road, every day of the week and now even the time of day. Pair that to the fact that the PND automatically and wirelessly receives real-time traffic speed and incident reports every two to five minutes and you'll get the image of a device that will most likely know exactly what's happening on the road ahead and will help you choose the best path in order to get as fast as possible to your destination.

Furthermore, by using a two-way wireless data connection, drivers can automatically access a large number of points of interest (POIs) with Local Search powered by Google, while the driver will also known what to expect for a certain region, since the device also provides five-day weather reports.

TomTom's PND also provides some form of GPS-enabled social networking via the TomTom Buddies function, which allows drivers to link their TomTom device to those of their friends so they can locate each other on the map, share favorite locations, as well as exchange and share location information and text messages.

The TomTomGO 740 LIVE will sell for an estimate $499, which, as mentioned earlier, is quite a surprisingly low price, given the numerous advanced features and specs the device has in store for drivers.


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